Globe-trotting ‘gold digger’ left pen name in Boulder County

Elizabeth Cochrane, a 19th century newspaper reporter, became an instant celebrity in 1890 when she traveled around the world in 72 days — less time than Phileas Fogg, the fictional character in Jules Verne’s book “Around the World in Eighty Days.” One of her editors gave her the pen name “Nellie Bly,” taken from the then-popular Stephen Foster song.

Clothes, games and dolls were named for the world traveler, and even a gold-processing mill in western Boulder County.

Nellie wrote for the New York World, in New York City, and her globe-trotting adventure gave a big boost to the newspaper’s circulation. The young woman sailed out of New York harbor on Nov. 14, 1889, to Southampton, England, then traveled to Paris, through the Suez Canal, and on to Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Yokohama. She then crossed the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco.

Every day, after Nellie cabled her latest story, her editors published a chart so readers could track her progress. During the final leg of her journey — by train across the U.S. — she waved to crowds at hundreds of railroad stations before arriving in New York City on Jan. 25, 1890.

A few years later, in 1895, Nellie was on another train covering a story in the Midwest. She struck up a conversation with fellow passenger Robert L. Seaman, a 70-year-old millionaire industrialist. Nellie was 31. They married on April 5, in Chicago, after a four-day courtship.

Nellie’s husband may have been on his way to Boulder County to oversee his gold-mining investments near the mining camp of Magnolia. Likely, Nellie went with him. A few weeks later, she (as Elizabeth Seaman) along with Robert and four other directors, signed incorporation papers for the Nellie Bly Gold Mining and Reduction Company, duly recorded in the Boulder County Clerk’s Office.

Capital stock of one million dollars was divided into one hundred-thousand shares of stock worth $10 per share. The company then built the Nellie Bly Mill, complete with roasting furnaces, an assay office and sleeping quarters. It processed gold ore from the nearby Keystone and Kekionga mines.

Robert Seaman died in 1904, leaving Nellie his entire estate, including the mill and a company that manufactured steel barrels. Then age 40, Nellie never remarried nor did she have any children, but a reporter noted that “she (Nellie) always had at least one child with her whom she cared for because it was poor and lonely.”

Eventually, the gold mill passed its peak production, and employee embezzlement caused the barrel business to go bankrupt.

To support herself, Nellie returned to journalism. In her early writing days, she had explored social issues and even feigned mental illness to be temporarily admitted to (and report on) an insane asylum. Her later writings centered on women’s suffrage.

In 1922, Nellie, then 56, died of pneumonia and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York. Foundations of the mill (on private property) remain. At the time of Nellie’s marriage, some in the press called her a “gold digger,” implying that she only married her husband for his money.

Maybe she did, and maybe she didn’t. But her pen name is here to stay and has become part of Boulder County’s gold-mining history.

Silvia Pettem can be contacted at silviapettem@gmail.com. She and Carol Taylor alternate the “In Retrospect” history column.